D3DX utility library

Relevant MSDN section, although unfortunately MSDN URLs tend to break over time.

A Brief Overview

The D3DX utility library is a legacy module containing a motley collection of high-level functions and interfaces that might be generally useful for graphics programming. A peculiar characteristic of D3DX is that it doesn't follow the common Win32 API pattern of maintaining backwards compatibility: there are multiple versions of e.g. d3dx9, each with a different filename and that differ in exported functionality or otherwise visible behavior. For reference, for d3dx9 that's d3dx9_24.dll to d3dx9_43.dll. Applications generally hardcode a specific D3DX library name, which means that they could potentially end up depending on quirks or caveats of the particular D3DX version in use.

In order to reduce source code duplication, the current implementation of d3dx9_xx DLLs in Wine uses the PARENTSRC build mechanism with all the code being stored in dlls/d3dx9_36/. That's currently (Wine 3.0) not the case for d3dx10 and d3dx11 DLLs, which still use the old forward mechanism. d3dx10_43 and d3dx11_43 are the DLLs with the implementation for d3dx10 and d3dx11 respectively.

As of 3.0, Wine's implementation of the d3dx9 API includes:

• most math functions
• ID3DXSprite interface
• partial ID3DXFont interface (currently missing text drawing)
• most surface and texture functions
• some mesh functions
• most of the effect framework

d3dx10 and d3dx11 are still stubs for the most part.

Also note that the shader assembler and compiler functions currently "forward" to d3dcompiler_43.dll, which is the "modern" API for these features.

Games for Testing

Here is a table of games that rely on d3dx9, along with which module they primarily (?) depend on:

See Also

• DirectDraw
• DirectPlay Games